SOURCE: Hill, H. Russell. “Poetry and Experience.” English Journal 55, no. 2 (February 1966): 162-68.

In the introduction to The Face of a Nation,¹ John Hall Wheelock recalls one of Thomas Wolfe's remarks: “I'd rather be a poet than anyone else in the world. God, what I wouldn't give to be one!” Wheelock found it incredible that Wolfe should not consider himself a poet, and pointed to the selections from Wolfe's writings in The Face of a Nation as examples of what he considered the poetic genius of Wolfe. Wheelock's comments serve to point out that the term poet is not an easy one to categorize. Conversely, the student may find it hard to determine who the poet is, let alone distinguish which one of many masks a poet may have chosen to wear in a particular poem.

In his Collected Poems² Randall Jarrell warns the reader that:

Some of these poems … are helped by the reader's being reminded of some particular story or happening or expression—something you remember if you have lived in the South, or been in the Air Force, or gone to Der Rosenkavalier, or memorized some verse of The Bible.

Jarrell seems to suggest that in such poems a few key words or phrases will reveal the poem in its fullest expression. If a few terms are all that one carries over from such experiences, then the stance of the poet would be as a language-conscious, humanity-oriented being who has borrowed some pieces from a segment of his background to fit together his poem. If, on the other hand, the poet has done more than put together a jig-saw puzzle of bits and pieces of experience, and has in fact placed the whole of an experience in the poem, then the reader must do more than remember a happening, or recall Der Rosenkavalier. Many, if not most, of our students may have no “background of experience” to recall in reading a poem. Their task in understanding the poem becomes an almost impossible one.

In his poem “A Front” Jarrell has used his Air Force background and its accompanying terminology. Moreover, the position Jarrell takes in the poem may be the key to his own experience. Is Jarrell in this case a poet/airman or an airman/poet? The difference is not specious. The airman who expresses in poetry the emotion of the instant adopts a far different attitude than the poet/airman. The question is whether or not the poet has taken a temporary stance as an airman to shape some universality that he sees in the situation. If the uniform of the airman barely covers the form of the poet, then this is not the same as the airman who finds poetry the most expressive medium in which to communicate. If John Hall Wheelock can tell by looking at Wolfe prose that Thomas Wolfe is a poet, then if one examines the text of a Jarrell poem closely, surely something can be discovered about the mask that the poet wears.

In an effort to find where Jarrell stands in his poem “A Front,” I made an attempt first to find which items depended, as Jarrell warned, on being in the Air Force. Moreover, since it is the rare student who can fall back on his “Air Force experience,” it was necessary to find an explanation for many of the terms. A one-hour group discussion of the poem was held at Hamilton Air Force Base, California, under the auspices of the Base Information Office. The members of the discussion included an F-101 Radar Intercept officer with flying experience at Goose Bay, Labrador, a former B-17 combat gunner with experience over Europe during World War II, and a former P-39, P-40, P-51 fighter pilot who saw action over China, New Guinea, and the Southwest Pacific. The members of the group were given a copy of the poem and two pages of questions about the terminology, the mood, and the feeling of the poem. The discussion, which was tape-recorded, lasted a full hour, with each member of the group participating fully and freely. The poem was maintained as a base at all times, and the comments were directed to the vocabulary, diction, imagery, structure, and mood of the poem.

“A FRONT”³

Fog over the base: the beams ranging
From the five towers pull home the night
The crews cold in fur, the bombers banging
Like lost trucks down the levels of ice.
A glow drifts in like mist (how many tons of it?),
Bounces to a roll, turns suddenly to steel
And tires and turrets, huge in the trembling light.
The next is high, and pulls up with a wail,
Comes round again—no use. And no use for the rest
In drifting circles out along the range;
Holding no longer, changed to a kinder course,
The flights drone southward through the steady rain.
The base is closed. … But one voice keeps on calling
The lowering pattern of the engines grows;
The roar gropes downward in its shaky orbit
For the lives the season quenches. Here below
They beg, order, are not heard; and hear the darker
Voice rising: Can't you hear me? Over. Over—
All the air quivers and the east sky glows.

—Randall Jarrell

Early in the poem one detects a note of panic. The phrase “cold in fur” (line 3), although apparently serving only as a descriptive device, indicating the type of flight suit or uniform worn by the crew, may also indicate the emotional state of the men in the planes. Capt. Peterson, the B-17 gunner, commenting on this line, referred to his own experience in “17's” (B-17 bomber aircraft):

From experience I found that I was freezing to death on the way up to a target, mainly because I was scared, and on the way back the anxiety was gone and I was too warm. Now they may be referring to the furry-type uniform or flight suit, and if these people had the same experience I did, and they must have had, that could account for that coldness there.

The B-17 was an unheated, uninsulated aircraft, and the temperature at 30,000 feet could be 50 below, regardless of the season of the year or ground temperature. Although the members of the bomber crews wore both electric heating suits and the fur-lined suits that Capt. Peterson speaks of, the crew members in the poem are still “cold in fur.” The image is within the plane, viewing the crew members, not from the ground. The plane can be tentatively identified as to type (as contrasted with the late-war B-29) and because of the identification it is easy for the professional airman to hypothesize the stage of the war! This set of identifying marks is important in determining the direction the action of the poem will take and will serve as valuable guideposts in determining the stance of the poet within the limits of the poem.

Major Collins, a former fighter pilot, further explained the reason why the professional airman can pin-point the type of aircraft: “Actually I get the feeling that this is a B-17 because by the time they hit the '29's late in the war there wasn't such panic going on.” How is he able to fathom that “such panic [is] going on” when all he has to work with is a weather front and a group of men who are cold, although heavily dressed? The answer lies in both the dramatic structure of the poem and later dictional and figurative devices which produce a rising note of apprehension, starting with Capt. Peterson's feeling of anxiety and ending with the panic that precedes a violent end to life.

The title of the poem foreshadows this conclusion. “A Front” is a term which deals with the weather. It is not synonymous with fog, for it heralds a change of weather and not necessarily bad weather. Yet to the airman, weather can be used in two senses. Major Collins used the phrases, changes weather and bad weather, in the same sense that the general speaker of standard English uses the noun. It is a generic term used to encompass both the clear day with an absence of clouds (as implied in changes of weather), and the cloudy or foggy day. Yet he also used “causes weather” and “go away from where the weather is.” In this sense, weather is a negative term referring to a meteorological condition which is adverse to flying. Although he would not likely use such a sentence, the professional airman could understand an utterance like “this change in weather means we'll have some real weather,” and differentiate between the two terms.

“A Front,” therefore, not only heralds a change, but a negative one. The change will be exhibited in the narrative which moves from the ice of fog to the heat of explosion. Jarrell, as a professional airman, could not help but know the terrible influence of weather changes on flying and the flyer. Dr. Douglas D. Bond in his book, The Love and Fear of Flying,⁴ reports:

In the early part of the war the weather in England was very bad and the methods of bombing were dependent upon good visibility. This situation led to the pernicious practice of alerting men night after night, only to have the missions scrubbed—a universal inhibition of action in the face of danger that led to the lowest morale of the entire war. Weather is an enormously important factor in flying, for it is one of the greatest killers. Poor visibility, icing, violent up or down drafts, night and extreme cold—all grip the flyer with panic and make him feel helpless, at least when he first experiences them.

Robert Frost titles one of his poems “Fire and Ice.” At the end of the world, or at the end of life, either one will suffice, according to Frost. Both are cruel enemies. The flyer in Jarrell's poem is suspended between these two poles. The peculiar dilemma of the flyer in a fog is that he may find that he is without any sense of what is up and what is down. If he stares too long at his instruments, he may find himself “transfixed” or “mesmerized” and yet if he ignores them or they are faulty, he may fly down, never knowing he is doing so until he crashes. He literally is suspended in the fog. From the “fog over the base” (line 1) to “the east sky glows” (line 19) runs the line of the narrative.

It moves from the air to the ground in the airman's necessarily systematic routine in which the planes are set up in a pattern and then, one by one, are brought to the ground. This orderly sequence will be broken, as the title suggests. The result will be panic and, finally, tragedy. The routine is consistent throughout the poem, from the initial landing to the plane which cannot land to the diversion of the flight south to the plane which insists on landing. Even the difficulty which this bomber suffers is not a departure from procedure, since the pattern includes provision for such difficulties. But the quoted response “Can't you hear me? Over. Over” (line 18) is not a part of the pattern or “standard operating procedure.” All three members of the interviewed group affirmed that the sequence should be “Do you read me?” Someone added that it was not necessarily the best response; simply that it was the agreed-upon structure for a radioed question of this nature. The repetition of the word Over was according to the pattern, but the question deviated. Major Collins explained the significance of this deviation:

The quoted part, this sounds a little bit like panic to me. Today the pilot would be so well controlling the situation that they wouldnt be apt to use this phraseology here, but it sounds very possible World War II types who had just gone overseas with very little training and very little knowledge of flying and suddenly they're trying to land and there's no hope to land it looks like, and they've got to land, and they get away from radio terminology and he suddenly starts talking plain English; “Can't you hear me?”

The change that is foreshadowed in the title rises in possibility through a chain of narrated events, now breaks out into the open with a break in the established routine. Major Collins continues:

What that particular line does to me, it suddenly shows me visually a picture—it suddenly shows me this young lieutenant in all his fur, in all his heavy flying stuff, he's scared and he's panicky and he's trying to hang onto life as long as he can, and he doesn't quite give a damn anymore whether his terminology is correct or not.

The layman who is not familiar with Air Force terminology might let the question go unnoticed, but the professional airman recognizes the panic that it implies. Dr. Bond mentions that, “seized with a nameless fear prior to landing, not a few men smashed their planes as a result” (p. 29). Whatever the reason, the pilot seems scared. The result on the ground is another break in the routine. Those in the control tower beg and order. The order of the verbs is interesting when we note that begging is certainly not a usual part of the landing pattern, nor even a military term. Discipline, order, routine, and control have been thrown to the winds. The pattern has been shattered, and Jarrell needs only to bring the action to a close. The note of panic has risen as the action line of the poem moves from fog to the inevitable fireball of the crash. It's as if the panic acted like adrenalin pumped into the action. As the action moves toward climax, the panic increases. But the increase moves the action faster. Almost geometrically, the action, both physical and mental, rises toward a towering pitch, only to be flung into the vacuum-like void left by the explosion of the downed plane.

The final line is a mute expression of the explosion: “The air quivers and the east sky glows.” No bang is heard, no crash intrudes. Has there been a crash? The reader without military flying experience may feel so, but the professional airman leaps to that conclusion. Once again, a difference that is not an apparent difference marks a point in the poet's rhetorical stance. Capt. Marker, an F-101 radar intercept officer, comments on the last line:

If you're fairly close to an aircraft accident, you can really feel the air quiver and the ground quiver for that matter.

Again, the emphasis on the sensory image is one that a particular type of experience dictates, not a universal or general reaction. This is the verb of one who has stood and felt an accident rather than heard it. Capt. Peterson noted his own experience:

That one we had here just a couple of months ago—that Thunderbird that blew right in front of us—the air quivered. You could feel it move along with the heat. There was a definite sense of movement.

Note that neither man is concerned with the lack of noise in the image. They speak from the experience of men who have felt the shock wave of an explosion. The glowing of the east sky marks the completion of the action/poem. This is the ball of fire that erupts when an airplane hits the ground, muted by the dense fog. The sudden shift from the pitch of action/emotion to the silence of the quivering air and the glowing sky provides a remarkable contrast. The change from airborne suspension to destruction on the ground has not been abrupt, yet the shock of the final image provides the reader with the full impact of the crash. The professional airman with military flying experience has been able to fix on a type of aircraft (and therefore the early stage of the war) and the emotional state of the pilot. But more than this, the pattern of diction, imagery, language, has been a specialized one, indicating a need for a common ground of experience before the poetic experience is fullest for the reader. Major Collins points out a common reference mark in his own experience:

In those days we used to go off to war with very little experience. I remember I went to the South Pacific, and I had ten hours in a fighter airplane.

To Major Collins the situation is fraught with emotion; to others not trained as he is, the poem must naturally have much less impact.

The base for action in the poem has remained centered inside the plane, and the stance of the narrator of this action seems air-oriented, not ground-oriented. The fog is over the base, the crews are cold in their fur suits inside the planes. The image “the bombers banging / Like lost trucks down the levels of ice” (line 3) contributes to this “positioning” of the poem. There is obviously a “heard” image in this line. But the very banging itself tells us where the narrator must be in our air/ground search for him.

The noise inside the airplane, the banging like a truck inside the airplane is very apparent, especially in the, well, certain models. They were tinny sort of things, and they did bang and clang and jang, and as you heard them land you didn't … as you were away from them you didn't hear this banging so much. You heard the screech of tires, and this of course is what you hear today.

In this fashion Major Collins locates the narrator for us. The selectivity of the audio-image sets limits on where the action takes place. Moreover, the “levels of ice” (line 4) are in the air, not on the ground. Although the casual observer thinks of ice as something that forms on the ground, or on objects like trees or buildings, the airman knows a more sinister form. When flying in a fog that is below freezing, the pilot must concern himself with “icing.” The higher he goes the colder it gets. When he descends, as in landing, he must do so in stages or levels in order not to let the ice build up to the point where the airplane ceases to fly.

If there is a gap in this airborne stance, it may seem to be with the five towers (line 2). For it is from those five ground-based towers that the beams range. But the narrator needs to establish his air-to-ground line of action early and these ethereal radio beams serve that purpose. They are not a solid line to be followed easily, but an oral signal, subject to interpretation by an inexperienced young pilot in a highly critical situation.

Throughout the poem, the ing form in ranging, banging, trembling, drifting, holding, calling, lowering, and rising, emphasizes the presentness of the situation. The narrator is there, on the scene, and those devices suggested so far indicate that he is there as an airman, not as a poet who is using the mask of the airman to present a universal truth he sees in the drama of the moment. The present participle in each case suggests again the orientation of the narrator. The ranging (line 1) refers to range (line 10), neither form having to do with wandering, meandering, or the wide open spaces. Nor does drifting (line 10) indicate aimlessness. The radio range, established by the five towers, provides a specific point of reference for the pilot. This range, although an ethereal one to the non-flyer, is an oral highway to the pilot, and is as narrow and rigid as the thin band of sound in his earphones. To the flyer who has no fear of the seeming nothingness of air, the on-course signal of the radio range is like a specific line, a guidepost as sure as the centerline in a highway is to the fog-bound motorist on earth. The earth-bound motorist who cannot treat the air as a highway, cannot understand the radio range as a place, but rather views it as the word suggests in general usage: a roaming or uncertain place. The succeeding holding (line 11) refers to the airman's routine once more. The planes are holding, in the sense that they suspend forward and downward motion. They must circle in order to do so. Captain Marker explains this flyer's device:

They have an established procedure whereby if you have a certain amount of aircraft coming in to a certain base, say ten aircraft, they have an altitude they will give you for each aircraft to hold on this certain fix; that is, a radio fix that you will go to and hold in a pattern: one will hold at 20,000 feet, another at 21,000 feet …

In the poem the planes are “holding no longer” (line 11). They are “changed to a kinder course.” Two points are marked by the narrator. The change is reiterated and two courses are set. The planes divert to a kinder course southward. This leaves only a less kind course for the remaining plane. The use of the comparative form emphasizes the negative aspect of the change. Any change will be for the better or the worse, but here the choice has been made. The rest move south. The narrator has cleared the way for his single “darker voice rising” (line 17). But his orientation has remained within the aircraft up through the panicstricken question. At this point he will shift his stance, only to find that those below are not heard. Their futile cries cannot stem the tide of change. The finality of the end is punched home by the shock wave of air. The present tense of the poem has stayed to the very end. None of the action is in the past, and there is no future. It is an episode of now, with no past and no future. Dr. S. I. Hayakawa's comment that the future is a human invention and a human dimension seems particularly apt in this case. The lack of a future is not a negation of that comment. It is a statement about the inhumanity of war. In the final line of Jarrell's poem there is no future, nor will there be. The report is not just the report of someone who saw what happened, but the on-going experience of the narrator. The reader is not asked to re-live a World War II experience. The experience is, it happens now, and it ends now. It cannot be re-lived; it must be lived. In this sense the general reader cannot live it, since it is the experience of the professional airman. The non-flyer can only stand outside the limits of the poem and wonder at a world where space in air suddenly becomes a rallying point, where there can be no direction, where a crash is not a crash but a quivering in the air. With such wonderment can come only a confusion and a questioning. In this manner Jarrell brings out his tragedy of death in youth, the everpresent why of the death of those who have yet to live life, the disappearance of a future for those who had nothing but future. The young man, who has lived such a short time that he has no “past” and suddenly has his future cut off, must remain a creature of the present, “trying to hang onto life as long as he can.” (Collins, in an interview)

In the fatal descent of the aircraft, the linear action seems a step-by-step process, uninterrupted and inevitable. However, a note of ascent is present in the “Darker voice rising” (line 17) which cries out in panic. As the voice rises, the plane descends. Yet, for the airman, it may well be that the earth rises to meet the plane. It is only from the fixed stance of the earth-bound man that the plane descends. To those in the fogged-in plane, their position may seem static and the earth rises to crush them out. It is the ground-oriented reader who assumes that the plane plunges into a fixed earth that is fastened firmly in one place. The voice is darker, with all the foreboding qualities which the word suggests. Like the lost trucks banging hollowly through icy levels of fog, it rises to a futureless void. The image calls forth the darker creatures of the night, the unknown mysteries of a future that cannot be verbalized. The pilot John Magee, throughout his poetry as well as in much of his correspondence, puts a heavy emphasis upon death. The imagery of death itself, personified, crops up often in literature about flying by flyers. “Pilots often seem to treat death itself as a living rival” (p. 29), explains Dr. Bond. In the chapter on “Fantasy and Flight” he indicates what happens to the pilot as his air environment works on him:

The combat aircraft, with its thundering power and latent threat, adds to the encouragement of fantasy that the atmosphere of flight provides. Together they create a wholly new environment marked by a release from earth-bound reality and by constant closeness to death.

(p. 13)

Over. Over—(line 18) signifies the end of radio transmission. It is the end of a peculiarly one-way transmission to which no future reply will be given. The narrator finishes the transmission with the airman's traditional verbal signal, and the quick change to the groundling's stance. Even on the ground the stance remains that of an airman. Jarrell makes no effort to relate the poem to a general reader. The very fact that it exists as an airman's poem provokes the response to his poet's theme. The generality of the theme is possible only through the restriction of the poet's stance. The poem succeeds for the general audience, if it succeeds at all, because the narrator is an airman/poet. Karl Shapiro ends his poem “Auto Wreck” with

Already old, the question who shall die?
Becomes unspoken Who is innocent?
For death in war is done by hands;(5)

But death in the airman's war is not done by hands, as Jarrell, the airman/poet has so well established. And “A Front” does what Shapiro's “Auto Wreck” does:

Cancels our Physics with a sneer.

The student who reads a poem and exclaims that he doesn't understand it may well have hit upon the crux of the poetic experience. Understanding why he does not understand it may, in turn, lead to a richer understanding of the process of poetry. In the case of Jarrell's poem, “A Front,” the matter is a crucial one.

Notes

1. Thomas Wolfe, The Face of a Nation (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1939), p. v.

2. Randall Jarrell, Collected Poems (New York: Alfred H. Knopf, Inc., 1955).

3. Randall Jarrell, Selected Poems. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1955). Reprinted by permission of Mrs. Randall Jarrell.

4. Douglas D. Bond, M.D., The Love and Fear of Flying (New York: International University Press, 1952) p. 29. Other quotations, credited to Bond, are from this source. Pages are given in each case.

5. Karl Shapiro, Poems, 1940-1953 (New York: Random House, 1953), p. 13.